PRIVACY OR SECURITY: MUST WE CHOOSE?

I try not to get caught up in the hurly-burly of the 24 hour news cycle. I don't subscribe to the English-language television and radio options that are available to me here in France. Instead, I depend on the written word - on paper and online - giving me the ability to step back a bit and see if I can detect a bigger picture. So I skip over the latest Trump silliness. (No, we didn't meet with the Russians. Wait a minute. We did meet with the Russians but not about Clinton. Wait a minute. The Russians said that the meeting would be about Clinton, but it really wasn't.) I skip over the latest missteps by Theresa May and her gang of Brexiteers. (If you're an English-speaking expat in Europe, you know what I'm talking about.) And I only take passing notice of the latest Tour de France updates. (Is it me or are there more disabling crashes involving favorites this year than previous?)

If I don't worry about the latest political dustup that has everybody else on tenterhooks, what is it that causes me to pause and wonder about the fate of mankind? Trophy hunting? GMOs? Rogue ice shelves in the South Atlantic?

No. I'm worried about cyber security.

I'm not concerned about my bank account. It's simply too small to be noticed. And I've done what I can to prevent viruses and hijacking. I worry that the predictions of the sci-fi authors are coming true. If it is online, it's hackable. Therefore, it's public. And since everything is online, everything can be hacked. And everything is therefore public. Period. Our government has discovered that it can't keep secrets. WikiLeaks has become a fashionable social media hero. Folks applaud. Shine a light, they said.

That's when I began to worry. Not because my nude photos might be published. (Because there aren't any.) I began to worry because documents aren't the only things that are online. Ask Iran's nuclear scientists about Stuxnet. Better yet, ask the folks who run our own nuclear power plants. In case you missed it, they've been hacked. They're safe, we're told. Special technology. You can hack the company headquarters but you can't effect operations. Yeah, the Russians hacked us. But they couldn't get anywhere.

Yet...

And it's not just nuclear power. It's the entire power grid that I worry about. And the financial markets. And traffic lights. And flight controllers. And the machines that pack my toothpaste tubes. Once hacking became acceptable, even noble in certain circumstances, all bets were off.

That's why I am not a fan of WikiLeaks. And that's why I think Snowden is no role model. And that's why I want my NSA back. That's right. I want a well-funded, high-tech, black as a black hole government agency at my cyber back, protecting me against well-funded and well-fed North Korean hackers. Against Putin's former KGB buddies and their cyber-fluent successors. Against the neighbor's kid in his onesie in the basement. I want Tommy Lee Jones or Helen Mirren taking charge. I want the equivalent of a Sean Connery or Jason Bourne cyber-agent unleashed.

We are always fighting the last war. We had to build a modern armed forces from scratch to face the Japanese and the Germans 75 years ago because we thought that two oceans protected us. And now, we are spending $400 billion to build jet fighters that we won't be able to deploy if our Command and Control is hacked and useless.

I don't demand accountability. I demand safety. That means stepping on some Constitutional toes. And you know what? If it saves the world from planes falling out of the sky or lye getting injected into my toothpaste tube or the whole world getting a look at my naked selfies, I'm all for it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most expensive item in an American family's budget may be health insurance. But many Americans have no understanding of the true cost of their insurance because it's included in their employment package. Folks simply don't think about how much their employer may be reducing their salaries when factoring in insurance costs.

Before I retired, my employer paid for my health insurance but I had to pay to insure my wife. The cost, taken out of my every paycheck, came to about $6,000 annually. And even with insurance, there were co-pays and other out of pocket expenses. We were reasonably healthy (and still are, knock wood), but we each take a few common prescription medications - for blood pressure and cholesterol and the like, nothing exotic or costly. Even so, with regular visits to the doctor, periodic lab work, the drugs, and the occasional illness or injury, we normally spent an additional several thousand dollars annually in the States over and above the cost of the i…

After 48 years, The Southern Woman That I Married can still surprise me.

We went shopping the other day. You see, we're at the beginning of the French winter sales. Yes, stores here have sales all of the time, but I'm talking about THE SALES. Twice each year, once in winter and once in summer, every store holds sales. It's an official thing. There's a national start date (although it may vary a bit from region to region), a national end date, and stores are not permitted to bring in stock just for THE SALES. So these are true clearances. Discounts can be 70% or more. Serious savings.

Yes, I know. Controlled capitalism. How could it possibly work? Hint: It
works because everybody buys into it, even the capitalists.

The day before we hit the shops, Cathey said,"Let's have lunch at Burger King." Be aware that Cathey has been trying to find a decent hamburger ever since we arrived in France. We've tried Buffalo Grill. We've ordered a burger at one o…

Blog authors

The Southern Woman That I Married is a skilled, multi-ethnic cook and I learned to eat at an early age. We've traveled the lower 48, Mexico and the Caribbean, but when we visited Europe, we fell in love with the south of France. So we first bought a holiday house that we visited once or twice a year, rented out when we could, and then sold in order to put our equity into a more suitable house for our permanent retirement. We found that house in the spring of 2013 in the little village of Quarante.
I relish the opportunity to provide my uncensored insights on cooking, on France, on motor scooter mechanics, politics and religion, and whatever else comes to mind.
My insights are free and worth every penny. Enjoy.